Iron Journalist

And better yet, they're ALL about CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY!

The thing about taking Info Hell is that more than any other class you have to be able to put up with tedium. Info Hell is not a difficult class per se; never will you be forced to completely alter the way in which you see the world or MacGyver a cure for cancer out of two aspirin and a Kleenex. Everything you need is out there, and there’s a whole lot of people on the University payroll who are willing to help you get it – hence the course’s official title, “Information Gathering.” But of course, as Morpheus says, “I can only show you the source document – you are the one who must annotate it.”

Information Gathering ought to be easy for me, being as I spend most of my time using the Internet to gather pieces of information (some of them nakeder than others). For a long time now my idea of a good time has been to log onto Wikipedia and just go exploring in that mighty, factually dubious theme park of knowledge. A couple weeks ago I spent a very enjoyable Saturday afternoon aimlessly surfing Wikipedia while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. The effect is not quite the same as watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon or smoking pot while listening to Dark Side of the Moon, but for me it was heaven.*

*The cool thing about listening to Dark Side of the Moon while on Wikipedia is that you can look up each song as you listen to it and read about all the hidden meanings so you don’t have to waste your time contemplating them. Take that, Roger Waters!

Info Hell isn’t that easy, though, because they won’t let us use Wikipedia. “Veracity of your facts is important!” They said, to which I replied, “But what if I just get a job at Fox News?” Regardless, the information we have to gather is hiding on a few more reputable but infinitely less awesome databases, such as EBSCO,* ulrichsweb,** and LexisNexis.***

*Electronics Boutique Searching Complete Orgasm!!, most likely from Japan.
**“Here’s what we do – take the sound a guy makes when you sucker punch him, then stick ‘web’ on the end. It’ll be the best database of publication information ever!”
***A seductive half cyborg alien secret agent assassin from the year 2121 (and probably Japan again).

Hello folks - this paragraph is going on vacation until March 11th at the latest.

But I think what I find scariest about the whole ordeal is that eventually, all of this is going to have to make sense. As much as I hate annotating, if all this class was about was finding sources and doing a two-page writeup about each one, I feel like I could do pretty well with it. Wikipedia or not, at the end of the day it’s still just poking around on the Internet for a few hours and then typing something about it, which is usually how this blog gets written. However, everything I pull together and annotate will eventually have to fit into a tightly structured essay that I write in the last week or so of class. If I use one more than the 32 sources necessary, I get zero points for the project. If I use one less, same result. I’ve been grabbing sources for weeks without knowing what my essay is exactly going to look like – I tend not to plan my writing (when I started writing this update, for example, I’d thought I was going to write about time management skills instead of Info Hell) and thus for me the thought of gathering together 32 sources and then having to use elements from all of them in an essay I haven’t even planned yet is a lot like that Iron Chef show.

You know what I’m talking about, right? They take the two chefs and give them a time limit and a bunch of ingredients (and one secret ingredient, revealed halfway through), and then they have to make some sort of dinner out of it. What worries me is that the timer is going to start and I’m going to realize that my ingredients are coconuts, Fritos, and mayonnaise, and then the secret ingredient that I have to use will turn out to be sautéed donkey shit.

To incorporate all 32 sources with slightly varying viewpoints, I feel like my essay is going to have to make some pretty huge jumps in continuity. I suppose my greatest fear is that my essay is going to read like Criminal Justice MadLibs.

This one, also. Thanks for your cooperation!

Truman Capps is going to try and annotate an entire season of Oz.